Burning Bright
by Aquamarine Stag
Summary: UPDATED! Tony Stark chose to live a short life of heroism and glory rather than the long life of an ordinary man. Loki complicates that decision. Magic can be a very dangerous thing for a man in love. Please review!
1. Chapter 1: The Stars

Title: Burning Bright

Characters: Loki/Tony, one-sided.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, no money is made, this is all riff and parody.

Warnings: Nothing I can think of. Spoilers for Avengers, but not really.

AN: This takes place post-Avengers, in the same universe as my stories Water Hemlock, Skifting and Mistletoe.

At the top of Stark Tower, Tony looks out into the sky. The light of New York washes away the stars: the sky is black, the city floats unanchored by constellations.

Beside him Loki, tells Tony about the infinite stars over the fjords of Norway, before electricity and electric lights existed. His voice is a silver harmony, a song binding the sky to the Earth. He is the most exquisite thing Tony has ever seen.

In the end, no matter what Loki had done, Thor could not bear that they would execute Loki. Thor adores Loki, that much is clear. He treats Loki with the confident familiarity of a long friendship, with the intense, awestruck passion of genuine love. It was a shock when he brought Loki to the Avengers and asked for their help in harboring him. It is almost impossible for the forces of Asgard to come and get him, now that the bifrost has been broken. The Avengers were his best hope of keeping Loki alive. And whether it was the ruthless pragmatism of Fury or the compassion of Captain America that finally won the day, Thor's request was granted.

Tony remembers the morning Loki came to Stark Tower. He was struck by the almost timid way that Loki stood in the lobby, his hair shockingly black against the coat of white rabbit fur, looking in quiet wonder at the steel majesty of Stark Tower. He was a remnant of an ancient past, uncertain and tentatively brave in the foreign soil of the modern world. Tony was so taken with him he forgot almost completely about the tesseract, the chitauri and the attack on New York.

But that is the way of humans. Their lives are short and they must always be rushing forward, trying to do everything before the curtain closes, the applause dies away and an invisible hand extinguishes the lights.

Tony volunteered to be Loki's ambassador from modernity and Thor, not wanting him to feel isolated and exiled, heartily agreed. While Thor is on Asgard, leading his family away from Loki's true location, Tony takes it upon himself to make Loki feel at home. His first few attempts are flatly rejected: Loki is too proud to accept a mortal's condescending pity. In the end, nothing he does draws Loki out. Loki has to come out on his own.

And he does, because Loki cannot stand to be ignorant and imprisoned, even if the prison is the self-imposed prison of his immortal pride. He is magical and magical beings are quick and curious by nature and cannot be contained for long. Loki comes out one night while Pepper is visiting her parents and asks Tony for a newspaper. Tony goes to the newsstand and buys him a copy of each paper. Loki reads them all in a few minutes, silently. When he finishes he looks at Tony and his large green eyes are apprehensive.

"This is not the world I remember from the centuries ago," he says.

"It's not the world I remember from yesterday," Tony says in what he hopes is a reassuring but not patronizing voice. "But that's New York. That's the modern world, it's always changing. You just have to roll with it."

Loki rolls with it.

Over the next few months, he imperiously allows Tony to introduce him to the modern world. The New York Public Library becomes a sanctuary for him, a haven of knowledge, and Loki reserves private rooms for Loki to read in. Books, however, are not his only source of knowledge: like all magical beings, Loki learns by living in the world. He spends hours walking through the city with Tony, forbidding him to talk, making him listen, instead, to the city.

At night, he weaves together for Tony the dim echoes of the day, threading together bits of conversation they have heard, a headline, a gruff sigh of a homeless woman, the howl of a dog from an apartment, the omnipresent hum of the traffic. All these things seem to be unimportant. But for Loki, like the hemlock and mistletoe, they are the ingredients of powerful spells. Loki can make the windows of the apartment buildings fly open all at once, he can make the cabs they take rise and fly over the streets; and he can make the subways tunnel to wherever he needs them to go.

Tony has always believed that magic was just science not-understood. Loki's magic is not quantifiable. It will not be logically encoded. It cannot be understood, only believed.

For a year and a half, Tony spends every spare minute with Loki. They shop on 5th Avenue whenever Loki needs anything. They go to see operas at the Met and musicals on Broadway. Loki is incandescent on the winter night they go ice skating in Rockefeller Center. He grabs Tony's hands and spins them around on the ice, his laughter rising like flame into the night.

Then the unthinkable happens. Tony collapses on the ice. He feels as if he cannot breathe. His chest clenches like steel bands are wrapped around his heart. He gasps on the cold ice. Loki stands above him in shock. He doesn't think to grab his cell phone or call 911. Why should he, Tony has not taught him what 911 even is. Instead he lifts Tony up, using his magic to help him get Tony to the car.

He does something strange and inexplicable. He doesn't drive Tony to the hospital, but out of the city, deep into the hilly forests of Westchester County. Tony thinks he is going into cardiac arrest, that Loki is inadvertently going to kill him. But when Loki finally brings the car to a stop on a forested ridge, the pain is lessening. Loki touches his face with his cool, white hands.

"Look, Tony, look up," he whispers. Tony does, and he is filled with the breathtaking vision of the infinite stars. The pain is swallowed up by the broad, open arms of the light-filled sky and Tony knows with a wild certainty that whatever is happening, _this_ is magic.

He lays back in the convertible with its top down, looking at the sky.

"I guess you had to find out sooner or later," he says finally.

"What is wrong with you?" Loki asks. Tony likes to think that he hears genuine concern in the god's voice.

"I'm dying, that's all. Happens to everyone." He doesn't feel sorry for himself. Nevertheless every time he says it, it hurts.

"You're dying?"

"It's the heart, the Ark reactor keeps me going but…but little by little its eating away at my heart."

"Can you remove it? There must be a way to remove the shrapnel without it."

"There is. They could take out the shrapnel then take out the reactor," Tony says.

"But…?"

"But the surgery would weaken my heart so much that I would…I'd never be able to wear the suit again. I'd never be Iron Man. I wouldn't even be able to take much stress. I could live 80, 90 years but I would have to live on a quiet farm in Idaho somewhere." He sits up and smiles at Loki. "Or I could keep the Ark reactor and have, maybe, ten years as a hero."

Loki smiles softly.

"I understand," he says. "It is better to live a short time and burn brightly, than to burn dimly even if one could burn forever."

"That's my thinking," Tony smiles. Loki leans over and kisses him on the cheek.

"If you are in pain, I can help you," he says. "I can't heal you but I can take away pain." He slides over in the seat. "Now you may drive me home, if you are feeling better. If not we may wait a little while longer."

Loki's impertinent, demanding attitude is something Tony finds endearing. The fact that the beautiful prince even stooped to driving the car himself, when he barely knows how, feels significant. All the way home, while Loki sleeps in the front seat, Tony steals glances at him, memorizing the line of his back and soft braid of his hair, grown long since he arrived, that falls over his shoulder.

Tony is in love with Loki. He knows that he is. New York City, the world, even Tony's own half-mechanical heart, none of them were real until Loki breathed his life into them. He sees his former life as a life lived by a half dead man in a graveyard of half-dead things; real life was always here, with him, in that love which is the strongest magic of all.

Tonight, Loki glides effortlessly along the edge of the building, half-talking, half-singing, old Norse lays and bits of popular songs strung together like beads on a necklace. For Tony, he is the return of the starlight that the city lights thought they could banish.

When Loki steps off the ledge, Tony is waiting for him. Loki stops and looks at him carefully. He sees something is different. Maybe he knows what Tony will say.

Tony takes both Loki's hands and pulls him closer, kissing him gently on the mouth.

"I love you," he whispers against Loki's cheek. "I'm not sorry I do. If I thought it would destroy the entire world I wouldn't be sorry and I wouldn't stop."

"I know you do," Loki says. Tony's heart—his real heart, not the battered, broken down muscle in his chest—tightens with hope. Loki lowers his eyes, then looks back at him.

"Tony," he says. "I have no memory that does not have Thor in it. We have lived a life together and that cannot be unlived. Our hearts were woven together. But—" And here Loki falters. Almost he seems overcome with emotion.

"But what?" Tony asks.

"But I promise you that when your time comes, I will drive you out to the forests to see the stars. And I will stay with you, until you go."

Tony knows now that he made the right decision. It was better to live a short life, soaring glorious above the mortal world, than to live a long tired life, wheezing and wracked with pain. He could not endure a long life without Loki, the thing he has come to love more than anything. Ten years will be bearable, ten years where his real heart burns with a love beyond mortal calculation, a love that will burn it to ash.

Tony's love could destroy the Avengers and it could endanger the world. He hopes only that whatever comes now will be glorious.


	2. Chapter 2: The Oath

**Title**: The Oath

**Characters**: Loki/Tony, one-sided sorta. FROSTIRON.

**Rated**: M for implied nookie.

**Disclaimer**: I own nothing, no money is made, this is all riff and parody.

**Warnings**: Slash. Nothing I can think of. Spoilers for Avengers, but not really. Maybe if you don't know some of their names.

Any Norwegian grandmother will tell you that magic is a very dangerous thing. They will tell you that love is the most powerful magic of all. Most of all, they know that magic can do terrible things to a man in love.

Tony has never been in love. He's never been in love, but beauty is a delicious substitute for love and Tony learned long ago that a heart intoxicated with beauty never has to touch its own alien emptiness. Beauty is warm and delicious and, for a time, it feels like love. Tony has developed an uncanny eye for beauty and an insatiable need for it. He has been with supermodels and movie stars, with starlets and stewardesses, waitresses and princesses. The women and men come and go in a carnival of faces, blurred by time and detachment and by his heart's drugged and reeling delirium.

But in every conquest, from the prolonged affairs to the one night stands, there is a part of Tony that looks beneath the surface of beauty, searching for the love that seems always to be just out of reach, sinking into the blue, lightless depths.

Everything changed for Tony Stark the night that he and Loki went ice skating in Rockefeller Center; the night he had a minor heart attack and Loki drove him out to Westchester New York, to see the stars; the night he promised to be with Tony when he died; the night Tony fell in love with him.

Magic can work miracles in a heart eager to love. Any Norwegian grandmother would have known that it was terribly dangerous for Thor to ever bring Loki into Tony's home.

For the last year and a half, the pale flame of Loki's beauty has illuminated Stark Tower. Loki is like all of the Fey Folk; a close encounter can dazzle a mortal, leave them drunken and stumbling in the dark, starving for the thing they cannot catch, that vanishes like wind through their fingers. Loki's form is a spirit haunting the halls of Tony's mind.

But Loki is proud. He looks on Tony's desperate love across the cold expanse of his godhood, at times with indifference, at time with what seems like pity. The hours that they spend together in New York, the thousands of dollars Tony spends buying him anything and everything he desires, all this Loki accepts as an appropriate offering to his godhood. In return, Tony receives the blessing of Loki's presence.

Tony Stark is in love and with each passing day, he grows more and more desperate to make Loki love him in return.

A little research. That's how it all starts, with a little research. Through a few friends at museums whose galas he occasionally attends, he learns everything he can about Norwegian lore. A connection at the Smithsonian puts Tony Stark in touch with an archivist at the Lofotr Viking Museum who tells him about the _Yfirring_, the Ring of Crossing.

Long ago, a little known legend says that the Yfirring was given to Loki by his brother Thor and that Loki swore to always cherish it. Should it ever become lost, Loki swore an oath to grant a boon to the person who returned it to him.

For 2.3 million dollars, Tony Stark purchases the Yfirring and has it flown in overnight from Denmark. He is in a state of restless anticipation while he waits for it to arrive, partly because he is desperate for Loki's love and feels that this is the only chance he will ever have to earn it, partly because he knows what he is about to do is reckless and terrible and may cost him not only his chance to win Loki's heart, but Loki's friendship as well.

The Yfirring ring arrives in a nondescript brown package. Inside, the Lofotr archivist has included instructions. Tony must hold the ring in his hand and read the Oath of Return, which the archivist has included.

Tony has to swallow down a tumbler of scotch before he can do it. The scotch blooms hot in his stomach and the heat rushes to his head. Holding Loki's image in his mind, he commits himself to his plan and in Old Norwegian (clumsily and with an atrocious accent) he reads the following words:

_Loki, Flame-of-Asgard, Beloved of his brother Thor. Behold, I have found your treasured Yfirring! I hereby commit it back to you and ask in return the gift of your gracious boon._

For a minute, nothing happens.

Then the door to his living room opens. Loki steps inside, long-braided hair swinging like a silken whip down his back. The light in the apartment that diffuses through the glass windows seems to dim; Loki's presence is brighter than the city lights.

"Oh," Loki says. "It's _you._ Did you call me with an oath? I'm in the next room, you know." He shakes his head. "You are a strange one Tony." Then he holds out his hand in that innocent demanding way.

"What?" Tony asks. He's almost forgotten what he holds in his hand. Loki's presence can wipe the sense from a man.

"You have my ring," Loki says. "I've been looking everywhere for it and I would like it back." Tony holds the ring in front of him and swallows hard.

"Loki, I—"

"You want the boon, I know," Loki says. "What do you want, Tony?"

For a second, Tony can't say what he wants. Then he's spilling out his request, without his usual suavity or careless charm, but with a burning mixture of hope and despair.

"Just the chance," he says. "That's all I want, Loki, the chance to make you fall in love me. We already spend every day together, Loki, every freaking day. I mean why not? Why not shouldn't we spend the nights together? That's all I want, no big change baby, and I'm so in love with you I can't freaking think or breathe without you, you're in my brain and the air in my lungs."

Loki stares at him. To Tony's shock, he doesn't look angry. He looks like he's suppressing a smile.

"So, if I understand you right, you want me to spend the nights with you as well as the days?"

"Only when Thor doesn't know," Tony says. "I understand—sort of—about you and him, and, baby, if I can read anything it's the writing on the wall. But while he's not here—I just want the chance, Loki, just the chance to make you fall in love with me."

It is true, everything he says is true. Sex and love are tangled together in Tony's mind. He has always looked for love through sex, and he cannot imagine any other way to let his heart speak to Loki's than by letting their bodies speak that intimate language of physical love. He truly believes that this will be his chance to make Loki fall in love with him.

Loki smiles at him with his icy, curious, unempathic face. Stark takes his hand, massages it gently.

"What do you say, beautiful?" he says. He tries to smile his award winning smile, but he's too sick with nervousness that his bid to win Loki's love will cost him everything, even his friendship. Loki tilts his head to one side.

"I swore an oath," he says. "But I've never, you know, _been_ with a mortal. They say it's very different." Stark stands up and Loki lets him put a hand on his waist, like they're about to dance.

"I love you like crazy," Stark says. "Just give me this chance." He grazes his lips against Loki's and feels the sudden flicker of energy. It arouses him in a way that hasn't happened in years. It is true that Tony cheats on Pepper regularly. Usually it is out of a mixture of boredom and opportunity, sometimes just for the simple pleasure of having yet another conquest under his belt, to flex his muscles, as it were.

Loki is different. He loves Loki, convulsively and desperately, beyond all control, beyond all mortal understanding.

"I think you'll find me more boring than you think," Loki says, and Stark catches just the hint of an embarrassed self-doubt. But it only makes Loki seem more beautiful, because it shows that tender underside of vulnerability. "I don't do anything half as…interesting as what I've seen on the internet."

"Forget the internet, who cares about the internet? If I want Star Wars porn and nerds arguing about which Lord of the Rings elf they want to bang, I'll go on the internet," Stark says. He's trying to make Loki laugh and it works. Loki smiles and there is something warm and intimate about the smile.

"You will not tell my brother-lover, though," Loki says as Stark dims the lights. Loki has a faraway, dreamy expression, but there is, as always, the shrewd, cunning light in his pale eyes. "You should know, Tony, that I've only ever been with one person my whole life and my brother is very protective of me."

"You don't have anything to worry about from me," Stark says. "Your brother loves me; we're buddies and I—I don't want to hurt him, Loki, I just…" he swallows. "I want this chance, that's all."

"Then, as I have promised, in return for my ring I will grant you your request," Loki says. He takes Tony's face in his thin, lovely hands with his black, lacquered nails. "I promise you that when you lie down you shall hold and love my body and when you wake, it will be my face that you see first thing, lying beside you." He kisses Tony gently. "Go to your room and wait for me?"

Tony cannot answer. He nods mutely. His body is tense already, his heart straining against the space between them.

Loki lets him go and disappears into his bedroom and Tony collapses on the couch, gasping, his hands trembling, his head swimming. In a moment, he gets up and goes into his room to wait for Loki.

He has no idea what is in store.

But it is entirely possible that, if he knew, he would not care.

Magic can do terrible things to a man in love.


End file.
